Indiana Jones and the Dial Of Destiny

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Just saw it last night. It’s an odd-numbered Indiana Jones movie, and it has Nazis; it should have been great. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great.

It got off to a bad start. The first three movies (can’t remember Crystal Skull) started with the Paramount logo dissolving into an actual mountain within the movie. This one didn’t. You mess with tradition at your peril. They did get the Wilhelm Scream out of the way early, so I didn’t spend the whole movie waiting for it.

I think it was Buckminster Fuller who said that something is perfect not when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more you can take away. I wish more filmmakers would take that advice. Too many narrow misses in the car chases, too many henchmen, too many MacGuffins.
The action sequences left me breathless because they were exhausting; I should be breathless because I forget to breathe.

Dr. Nazi was apparently a genius archaeologist, mathematician, and rocket scientist. He was part Wernher von Braun, although the real von Braun was famously apolitical. He thinks he can go back and run the Third Reich to correct Hitler’s mistakes, but without Hitler’s popularity it would have gone nowhere. I still don’t know who the Americans were that were helping him at the beginning, or why. The Antikythera is described as a mechanism to predict displacements in time, but they act like it can control what time it takes you to. Indy has to flee to avoid a murder rap, even though there’s no motive or direct evidence. At the end, he’s back home and no one mentions it.

Someone upthread said we want to spend time with characters we like. I agree. Seeing Indy teaching at a run-down college, living in a tiny apartment, and getting divorced is not what we hoped for him. I think it would have worked better to have him still at his old school, but with all his younger colleagues treating him as the doddering old emeritus, until he has one last, great find.

There were good moments. Nice to see Sallah again, but I may not have recognized him except for his voice. Nice to see a strong, female sidekick, instead of a damsel in distress who needs constant rescuing. Great to have Karen Allen back.

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  1. I believe they intended to do the Paramount thing, but Lucasfilm lawyers were like, “Uh, excuse me, our company’s logo goes last. Please correct,” and they ended up stuck with what we got.

  2. Wilhelm Scream sounded pitch-shifted, very strange to do.

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I can believe that, but it still sucks.

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Now that I think about it, they could have used that. Show the Lucasfilm logo, and then dissolve to something like this:


The camera pulls back and Indy is working on an English car.

Since the movie started with a flashback to 1945 Germany it would have been tricky to work that in, but it would have been worth it.

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Indiana Jones and The Prince of Darkness

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They’re missing a great opportunity along with some easy cash by not doing some quick editing this weekend and creating Indiana Jones and the Sound of Freedom.

By the way, freeing enslaved children from captivity is old-hat for Indy.

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Just for fun, news from the “real-life Indiana Jones” (except not, since, as far as I know, he never robbed graves and sold artefacts on the black market):

“You need to be a little crazy for this work,” said Dr Ivan Šprajc, taking a drag of his cigarette and staring at me with ice-blue eyes. “You have to be careful about the snakes, insects, jaguars and everything else. But there is something pushing us. You have to suffer a little if you want to find something that few people have ever seen that was hidden for so many centuries.”

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The one thing that stuck with me for a couple weeks:

1 - Nazis find the Lance of Longinus as their new mystical superweapon
2 - Testing finds that it’s made out of a (semi) modern alloy that definitely didn’t exist in 33 AD
3 - Therefore it’s a fake with no power. Jesus wasn’t killed with a stainless steel (or whatever) spearhead
4 - A plane full of modern metals gets shot down in a perfect place to be stripped by the the Romans a couple hundred years before the crucifixion.
5 - It might have been real. Good thing Indy stopped the train!

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Oh, is this what we are supposed to figure out? That is actually quite creative.

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I saw it again and actually really liked it quite a bit more this time. It’s actually quite great at times. My question. Full open spoilers here, hope that is OK:

Just before they enter the gap that takes them back in time, Indy begins to say, “Continental Drift. We aren’t going to 1939 because Archimedes didn’t calculate for continental drift!”

So they go through. 2200 years back in time.

But when they are there, Wombat says that it was by Archimedes design they came there. “It was always a one way path; he designed it so we would arrive now to help him.”

So, which was it? They were off because of continental drift or Archimedes did know about drift and planned for them to go back to that exact point?

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Both and neither. Archimedes planned a one-way path that would lead to Syracuse, drift or no drift. Indy was wrong about the continental drift thing. He knew it wouldn’t lead to 1938 Germany, but he didn’t know where it would lead them.

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Thanks for the trailer. I’ve seen the other Indiana Jones movies.

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But note this is for box office–and doesn’t include later revenue from streaming…

But still it seems crazy to spend $387 million.

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That will teach them to make a film with a capable woman in it! /s

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I only just got around to watching this the other day and it’s not as good as the first three movies, but not as bad as Crystal Skull. It is, however, bad for some of the same reasons - most of which seem to just be down to bad writing. I mean, The Antikythera - not The Antikythera Mechanism, just ‘The Antikythera’ - what’s next? Indiana Jones and The Rosetta? This silly and unnecessary detail yanked me right out of the action (I could have accepted that the mechanism is a time machine, just not this).

The bit I mentioned upthread still seemed cartoonish and silly (Indy ducks, a room full of people with guns, fire intently and repeatedly at the space where he was).

Better than Crystal Skull, but most things are.

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Finished watching this on television today. Offhand I’d give it a 4-6/10, though I’m leaning toward the lower end.

How do I put this…I couldn’t decide whether it was a bunch of unrelated cool-ish scenes that the writing staff tried really hard to cobble together, or a fairly predictable story that the effects team tried really hard to convince us was cool. Mostly I was disappointed in all the plot details and entire characters that either came out of or went absolutely nowhere. Indy’s loud neighbors, the murder rap, how Dr. Voller was able to slip under the radar, Helena’s jilted fiancee, the Greek salvage crew Indy just happens to know, why Indy separated with Marion (this was never adequately explained), how the kid figured out how to fly a plane, and of course how the hell the Antikythera Mechanism has any mystical time-travelling power in the first place.

On top of that, yes, I’ll be the guy to say it, an 80-year-old should not be an action hero. I could all too clearly see the harsh limits of what Harrison Ford was capable of, and it was more than a little dispiriting. Narrowly avoiding subway cars on horseback and rigging an oxygen tank to escape a school of eels are nifty tricks, but hardly the superhuman feats Indy pulled off on a regular basis in the previous movies. (Side note: This is why I completely fail to understand how that damn refrigerator became such a ginormous honking deal, much less get flagged THE ONE crazy stunt he ABSOLUTELY COULD NOT HAVE SURVIVED.) I suspect that this is why there are so many chases; it’s the only kind of thrill ride Ford could’ve done with any level of actual excitement. There’s this big backlash against Phoebe Waller-Bridge (no idea why, unless it’s the usual mouthbreather brigade having their standard reaction to any woman to the left of Melania Trump), but was there really any choice but to let her take control?

Also, there seems to be a weirdly out of place pessimistic tone covering everything. Indy is divorced, his son got killed in war, and in his final days as a professor no one respects him at all or even seems aware of his accomplishments. (Plus the murder rap…seriously, what the hell was that about?) In the end he decides he’d be happier living out his life in an ancient war zone than a comfortable retirement in New York, which Helena has to prevent by force. (This scene would’ve worked much better if Archimedes simply had a heartfelt conversation with him explaining why they were fated to meet, then gave him a special gift to take back to the present so Indy could at least close out his archaeological career with a victory.)

Maybe I’ll go thorough it again and see if I can make better sense of everything. In fairness, there’s plenty of cool stuntwork, and it’s good to see the sidekicks play a more prominent role. But I can’t shake the feeling that Cystal Skull would’ve been a much better sendoff for the legendary whip-wielding adventurer than this.

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Uh, I’d even rank Crystal Skull as the third best overall. I rank them:

  1. Last Crusade
  2. Raiders
  3. Crystal Skull
  4. Temple of Doom
  5. Dial of Destiny <–honestly, pretty, uh…bad? not great?